No, it’s not just that all of them are dead. In looking at the lives of these four exceptional human beings side-by-side and from a historical context, I found that they have a lot in common, something I did not notice before. The outcome of this new reading gave me a new appreciation for their contribution to our understanding of this blundering humanity of ours. That’s the astonishing story I want you too to see from this perspective.
This post is about the threads that connect their lives stories. You see, it’s not only the how, why and by whom they were kidnapped and seized, and how intimately connected they are by their response to the concomitant post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The truth is that thread connects them directly to us today. Firstly, because these four people’s life experiences with trauma were and continue to this day to be devalued, but even more significantly, because we contribute to the perpetuation of the conditions that led to those inhumane experiences. I will also touch on some of the logic used by some of those who support, openly or tacitly, the institutions that perpetuate the brutality and injustices described here.
I hope you will realize, after reading this post, that what we ultimately do with the stories of these four human beings will depend largely on what we have in our hearts. These stories show that, for today’s oppressed ‘masses’ and for the weak or powerless to become strong, there must be a transformation in their hearts and beliefs that would impel them to demand a change in the violent nature of the structures of power in which we are all ensnared. That’s part of the crucial value these four stories still have for us today. The fiction they wrote is about the reality of this human society: that it desperately needs a makeover.
NOTE: I will not charge you to enter this blog; I only ask you to read that badge on the upper right corner, and to understand that this is a non-professional writer and blog. ESL is all-over the place here, but Einstein too didn’t learn proper English and had a gruesome English accent (worse than mine), and yet you wouldn’t consider him stupid, would you?
THE PERSONAGES
Miguel de Cervantes, creator of famous mad adventurer Don Quixote de La Mancha, had a pretty crazy adventure of his own. In 1575 he was kidnapped for ransom by Turkish pirates [1] while sailing through the Mediterranean Sea as a soldier on his way back home from the Spanish war against the Turks. He was sent to Algeria as a captive/slave of some Turk ‘masters’. They shackled him to a rock in a dark dungeon, enchained from neck to feet, and demanded a heavy ransom for his release because, as more bad luck for him would have it, when the pirates captured him, they found on him letters of recommendations from military higher ups and priests for his performance as a soldier for the king. He was carrying them with the hope (not guaranteed) of getting a job back home as he was returning from war. Based on these papers, signed by important people, the pirates mistook him for a monetarily valuable captive, who he was not, and set the ransom accordingly and greedily extremely high. He was not famous at that time (he was being recommended for his bravery as a soldier), so the king didn’t think it wise to spend so much money needed for sending other men to die for the crown just to save him and the other captured soldiers who were nothing to him. The ransom didn’t come until five years later (1580), from family and from a religious order of monks, the Trinitarians (independent from the church and dedicated to rescuing Christian captives). Four times he bravely but unsuccessfully tried to escape with other captives before the ransom finally arrived.
Guess what the topic of his first literary compositions was after finally having been ransomed and liberated? He wrote plays in which he fictionalized the horrible things he experienced and saw as a captive (witness to slaves being literally quartered for stealing food, for example): Los Baños de Argel (The Dungeons of Algiers), El Trato de Argel (Life in Algiers), La História del Cautivo (The Captive’s Tale), among many others. Don Quixote itself is peppered with references to that experience. For a fascinating book about his captivity and how it affected his writing, check out Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive’s Tale by Maria Antonia Garcés (2002).
In 1849, Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment) was sentenced by Tsar Nicholas I to a prison (more like a concentration camp) in Siberia for his political views and actions against him. But before shipping him to Siberia, the tsar played a cruel joke on then young Fyodor. Pretending that Dostoevsky was sentenced to death by firing squad, he staged the execution, and as Fyodor stood blindfolded in front of the firing squad, at the last second before the “fire!” order was to be heard, a tsar’s messenger rushed in and ordered the firing squad to stop the execution because the tsar, “in his divine justice,” decided to spare his life and send him instead to the Siberian prison. Dostoevsky said in his Dairy of a Writer that, basically, his whole life passed in front of his blindfolded (mind’s) eyes at that last second when he expected to hear the “fire!” order. And thus they dragged him to the Siberian prison, released in 1854, but not allowed to leave Siberia until 1864. Guess what the topic of the first book he writes and publishes after his release, but still in exile, was? He immediately laid down in fictional form his experience in that Siberian hell in the novel Notes from a Dead House (sometimes translated as The House of the Dead) in 1862.
Primo Levi was a Jewish writer and chemist. Levi was at the Auschwitz concentration camp for only one year. He left the camp in 1945, but the camp never left him. Guess what the topic of the first book he wrote after his release from that unimaginable hell was? He wrote Survival in Auschwitz in 1946 and published it in 1947, a true account of his experience there.
Finally, Shulamith Firestone, a radical feminist of the 1960s and 70s, hated (then and today) not only by capitalist men in power, but by just about every religious organization run by men (is there any not run by men?), and by some feminists, author of the ground-shaking book The Dialectic of Sex. After 10 intense years of political activism, she ‘disappeared’ in the early 1980s, only to reappear again after, literally, given up for dead, with a new book published in 1998. Unbeknownst to most people, she was in and out of New York City’s psychiatric hospitals, involuntarily committed, since the early 1980s. At that time these hospitals were akin to chambers of psychological and physical torture: forced medication, forced electroshock “therapy”, physically restrained for days for refusing ‘treatment’ or for disobeying the ‘orderlies’ orders, hospitals as pharmaceutical’s drug testing labs. [2] It wasn’t until 1990 that she was finally able (temporarily, as it sadly turned out) to break the cycle of involuntary hospitalizations and secure the conditions that allowed her to eventually write again. Guess what the topic of her first book after Dialectic was? It was Airless Spaces, a small book where she fictionalized her experience in the New York City psychiatric system.
WHAT DO THEY HAVE IN COMMON?
Traumatic experiences
So, this is the first thing they have in common, that despite coming from different parts of the world and epochs, their traumatic experiences came from the same source: from within the grossly dehumanizing social organizations of power created by men in power. [3] Each one of them had their freedom forcibly taken from them and without their consent, some by their own government and its supporting institutions (Fyodor and Shulamith), some by the foreign enemies of their governments (Levi), and some by both (Cervantes). These organized forces dragged them into caves, camps and hospitals units of torture for extended periods of time, making their humanity irrelevant to both their own governments and their governments’ enemies.
The most interesting thing to me here is that these kidnappings and abductions were perpetrated, as they are today, in the name of ‘justice’, of ‘God’, and to ‘protect you’. Throughout history, men in power [4] have shown a funny habit of brutally compelling the masses under them (other men, women, and children) into obedience in the name of their devious ideas of ‘justice’, and of their particular (male) gods. And herein lays our dire human need to recognize this attitude of brutality not only as world-wide, but, more significantly, as man-made (and by a few men at that), and start challenging it instead of justifying it. (And yes, men must challenge men in this respect.) I propose that this is the hidden message these four writers were trying to convey to us with their stories of captivity.
Coping with PTSD
The next shared experience between these four beautiful human beings is how they tried to cope with their traumatic experiences: they all had to immediately write about it. Their writing seems aimed at purging their bodies and minds of the poison of human cruelty inflicted on them physically and mentally, of the psychological cruelty of having been made to witness impotently those around them suffering impossible tortures, and of the torture that it must have been sharing their lives with other human beings already stripped of their own humanity.
Some ‘sages’ say that “suffering tests and awakens generous sentiments,” but we know better than that, don’t we? This poison of cruelty, if left untouched inside the heart and memory by a soul-searching understanding of what happened to me, could easily turn into hatred and prejudice. Based on their writings alone, without having to know them personally, you can tell they were aware of this. Neither of them became haters. On the contrary, they all became humanists. The same can’t be said of other survivors of torture. For example, Elie Wiesel, also a survivor of Auschwitz, in 1985 became a holocaust denier—of the Armenian holocaust, i.e., and supported Israel’s expansion of Jewish settlements into Palestine during the Six-Day War, such settlements are still considered illegal by the international community. These are controversial and controvertible facts about Wiesel, but I include him as a sample that there is more than one path after trauma: you can take the humane path, which requires an expenditure of mental energy to restrain one’s passion for retribution, or the easy path of hate and destruction, which requires only unrestrained expressions of passions: let it rip.
All of these writers suffered the unceasing psychological pains of PTSD for the rest of their lives. In Primo Levi case, for example, it is still debated today if he committed suicide, but what is not debatable is that, if he indeed committed suicide, it was under the weight of those unerasable memories, the PTSD he suffered for 43 interminable years.
In my personal relationship with Shulamith Firestone, I had the anguished privilege of witnessing how PTSD affects a writer and how she stumbles to recover from it. Firestone lived the rest of her life in fear that she would end up being dragged back, again, to psychiatric hospitals (for that is not a place one associates with humane treatment for recovery), forgotten by everybody, again. She chose outpatient psychiatric treatment voluntarily and on her own terms as her tool to cope with PTSD, and, paradoxically, to stay out of hospitals. For this choice, some anti-psychiatry feminists criticized her. (I’ll come back to this later below.) Nevertheless, she lived the next 10 years with a measure of mental health stability that allowed her to write again. As she was steadily recovering, Shulamith had an urgent need to write about what happened to her in those previous 10 years of her life, just as Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Primo Levi, and any human being with profound intelligence and writing skills would be compelled to do in the same situation. And yet, even for this, she was criticized.
Stories of life-turning experiences devalued
We may know intuitively that the horrific traumatic experiences that some people undergo are invariably and inevitably turning points in their lives, but we don’t get to see how the concomitant PTSD turns those lives around, unless they are our neighbors, relatives, or friends. Yet we can get a glimpse of it thanks to the determination of some of those people to tell the story of their journey through that man-made hell on earth where their lives took a turn to never be homeward-bound again.
Do we appreciate or understand their need to embody in words the most terrifying memories they carry in their minds as heavy baggage wherever they go, and their need to share them with us in a form that selflessly spares us of the ‘burden’ of having to identify with them personally, in fictional form, i.e.?
“Airless Spaces… seems designed explicitly to discourage sympathy”
After reading some literary criticisms, I could say that, except for Primo Levi, Dostoevsky’s, Cervantes’, and Firestone’s stories of horror are not appreciated by many critics of literature and political ‘analysts’, whether today or in their own time.
‘I don’t wanna hear about it’
Many literary stories about traumatic experiences focus not on the author but on the other human beings around them during those terrifying events. It seems to me that these writers intended giving the reader a picture of what it is like to be a human being in the most inhospitable and hostile places men have created to teach each other a lesson or two about who is actually in power. In their stories, they are pointing at something (in) humane, not just at the data of what happened in their particular hell; they point at what happens in the human heart when a person is dehumanized, and the consequences to the person and to the rest of society.
But there’s nothing haters and some men in power (politicians, billionaires, and some women too) hate the most than compassion, love, peace, and humanism. These are ideals that demand the dismantling of those institutions of controlled abuse of others. And that’s how we find that today, almost 420 years after he wrote Don Quixote, Cervantes is still being criticized by many literary and political critics—many from Spain—for including prominently in it his two pet peeves: slavery and the oppression of women. (I bet you blinked after reading that last phrase. For an engrossing and non-misogynistic discussion on Cervantes’ treatment of women in his work, see The Man Who Invented Fiction by William Egginton (2016).) Regarding Dostoevsky, the thing that peeved the Russian left (then and today) is that, as a consequence of the shock of the near death incident and years in Siberia, he found refuge to his trauma in religion and (I admit, this is difficult to swallow) became an apparent supporter of Tsar Nicholas I. More on this further down.
For Firestone, there seems to be a tendency among some feminists of academia to recoil at her human need to tell the story of her experience. (I explain further down why I focus so much on some ‘feminists of academia’.) Why this aversion to her book? One could speculate until eternity about the sources of this cringing reaction to her Airless Spaces, but I have one theory that I thinketh makes sense.
You see, all these elitist (male and female) haters of humanism and of the downtrodden invariably leave behind some breadcrumbs we can follow to the real source of their cruel criticisms: fear. How we interpret anything is colored by what is in our hearts, and what they choose to attack shows us what they fear the most in their heart of hearts. Almost invariably it is that which poses a threat to their power and privileges. They fear losing: their elitist privileges, their hold on political power, even fear of being outed as intellectual accomplices in the service of the institutions of oppression they claim to be against.
So let me share with you an example of the breadcrumbs these unsympathetic critics left behind for each of these writers I’m focusing on.
BREADCRUMBS
Breadcrumbs for Cervantes
Regarding Cervantes, I have read critics of Don Quixote who find the stories in it about the captives of Argel to be boring and distracting, enough to make the reading of the whole novel ‘unpleasurable’, they allege. What could be so offensive in stories about slavery that these people have to throw out the baby with the bathwater? Here is the whole loaf of breadcrumbs.
In Don Quixote and in his earlier writings, Cervantes discussed, in a not-so-veiled manner, how the Catholic church’s inquisitors (the Inquisition was at its peak in those days) and the king, basically, schmoozed together to make it official the interrogation of the liberated captives immediately at their arrival at the Spanish ports (today we would call that debriefing) to see if they had engaged in apostasy against the church or the crown while being tortured by the Turks. By ‘betraying’ they meant converting to Islam when threatened to be quartered in big fat chunks if they didn’t renounce Catholicism. So these poor souls (men, women, and children), who suffered unspeakable and unbearable tortures and dehumanization at the hands of their Turks and Muslim kidnappers, came home only to suffer more torture and dehumanization at the hands of the sacrosanct inquisitors, and for the love of God no less. Many people confessed (under threat of burning at the stake) to having saved their lives by converting to Islam, but it didn’t matter to the inquisitors that they swore with pleading tears they did it only from the mouth out, to save their skins. Some of these liberated people did end up burned at the stake by the inquisitors soon after their arrival for admitting to their breakdown in the face of torture. You see, they were supposed to choose between suffering martyrdom in Argel or die at home in the hands of the inquisitor as punishment for saving their battered bodies. And children too had to make the choice. ¡Olé!
So there you have it, the boulder-of-a-missing-link that explains in part the Spanish government and the church’s dislike of Cervantes and of the surprising, to them, popular success of Don Quixote. They have always resented the discussion of this little stain by Cervantes, who was, naturally, himself interrogated when he arrived at the Spanish port. Today, many right-wing elitist Spaniards consider Don Quixote an anti-old Spain and unpatriotic oeuvre. Ask yourself, How open-minded is our American government today to public criticism, books, or movies about how it tortured and continues to torture men at Guantanamo? Government supporters consider unpatriotic any such criticism, don’t they? Can you see the unbroken, tenuous thread connecting us to Cervantes in 1605, the year he published the first part of Don Quixote and the attacks on him as writer started in full swing?
The Spanish government and the church are invested, then and today, in distracting the public from this historical fact. That they tortured these freed prisoners is more atrocious and offensive to even our minimal sense of morality than the same acts of torture committed by the Turks, because they were committed against their own people and soldiers, and because torturing already tortured people is an act of extreme cruelty and inhumanity. Even more so when you consider the mind-boggling excuse for it: to secure obedience of Christians at home by instilling fear of consequences of not obeying the church mandates. That was the raison d’être for the existence of the Inquisition: to instill fear. So, they badmouth Cervantes as a ‘bad writer’ and Don Quixote as undeserving of the global praise it receives even today.
FYI, Cervantes was excommunicated at least twice and imprisoned by the Inquisition for the crime of charging taxes to the church. (He fictionalized this in Don Quixote.) There’s poetic justice in the fact that one job he finally got years after he came back was as a tax collector. Of course, he got fired. He actually died poor, despite the success of Don Quixote while he was alive. That’s another interesting story for Cervantes’ fans to look up. [5]
Finally, we have today’s literary misogynists (a lot of them still out there) who would happily bring back the inquisition just to burn Cervantes alive for daring to write that chapter on Marcela the shepherdess, the most consistently slammed episode by them. If the Marcela chapter is not one of the earliest instances of feminism in literature, written by a man, to boot, then I’m not from this planet.
Breadcrumb for Dostoevsky
Regarding Dostoevsky, as I mentioned above, the thing that peeved the Russian left (then and today) is that he found refuge in religion and supposedly became an ‘uncritical’ supporter of the tsar. But no, he didn’t become a Pentecostal-type right-winger, which is the impression his critics want to paint in your mind. The accusation leads to an automatic association, something like this:
Tsar = right-wing S.O.B., dictator, and head of ultraconservative Russian Orthodox Church.
Fyodor = supports the tsar and the church.
Ergo: Fyodor is a S.O.B. who supports dictatorships and religious ultra-conservatism.
But he could not be a S.O.B. because he was critical of the tsar. After Siberia, he became that thing that both Marxists and fascists hate the most: a humanist and a true supporter of the slaves, women and children. He criticized the tsar for allowing the landowners to abuse the serfs, and he passionately criticized (maybe the first to do it) the legal system for punishing women who defended themselves from grotesquely abusive husbands. And here comes the breadcrumb: the one thing those in power (right and left wingers) hate the most about him, but you never hear them say it, is that he strongly advocated for freedom of speech, even against the tsar. Neither Lenin nor Stalin nor Mao (unnecessary to mention your usual brand of fascists in this list) was fond of denunciations of censorship against themselves. That’s why you don’t hear them complaining about Dostoyevsky’s stands on this topic. It’s easy to destroy a person’s reputation; all you have to do is hide the facts and spread lies. It should sound familiar to you, particularly to women, if they remember how the 60s and 70s feminists’ words were distorted to brand them as lesbians (a sin!) and mad anti-men women. It’s a propaganda tool, even before Goebbels. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.
Thus, to this day, Dostoyevsky continues to be slandered as a right-wing monarchist, and even as anti-Semitic by those who fear his defense of humanity against the abuse of those in power. But that’s a topic for another post one of these days. In the meantime, read his Dairy of a Writer, you’ll be surprised at how progressive and a beautiful human being this man was. He addressed there many of the criticism you hear today.
Breadcrumb for Firestone
This one is more difficult for me because it’s happening as we talk; hard to see the forest from the trees. I guess Shulamith’s curse is that few of her feminist critics would want to look at how she overcame her greatest adversity, mental illness. I propose it is because of feminists’ fear and prejudice about mental illness. To be fair to these ‘sisters’ [6], this fear can be reasonably traced back and attributed to the slanderous capitalist media propaganda since at least the early 20th century that portrayed women in the early feminist movement as man-haters and mentally ill. The implication in the mainstream media has always been that feminism is the product of mental illness, an abnormality, and abhorrent at that; no ‘compassion’ for the ‘sufferers’ of this ‘illness’. On the contrary, they have to be destroyed as dangerous witches. This is what Firestone and the 1960s and 70s feminists, radical or mild, had to endure. But a Cultural Revolution they achieved (together with the Black movement) despite the weight of state patriarchy having been thrown at them. And this is why patriarchy in the USA will not make the same tactical mistakes that allowed the success of that Cultural Revolution again. You can call patriarchy anything you want (dick, creep, douchbag…) (…manwhore, cisgender –the lowest of the low…) but stupid: he quickly learned the lesson and quickly found a more efficient way of destroying feminism. How?
He went back to the drawing table, saw the tactical mistakes in his perennial undeclared war against women, and corrected them accordingly. He got women of academia to declare the death of feminism (“post-feminism”), and a few years later he topped that off by snatching out from the feminists’ weak hands the most important signifier of the women’s liberation movement victory: the right to abortion. No more “our bodies, ourselves”, no more cultural revolutions on his dime. How did he achieve this hideous victory over the “third and fourth waves of feminism” in the short span of 50 years? (Roe v Wade 1973) Answer, he keeps the eye on the prize: power and authority, its vehicle is financial wealth.
The feminists of the 60s and 70s forced open to women the doors of institutions of higher learning and academia, but those still belong to him. So he licked his wounds and decides that it is better for him to let them in and reward women willing to work for him. Logically, he wouldn’t feed radical feminists to attack him from inside his own property. In exchange for elite status as ‘intellectuals’, many women entered academia willing to attack the history of feminism, attack radical feminism and feminists, and declare feminism dead. Modern conservative ‘feminism’ was born there. In this way, he, patriarchy, learned that he doesn’t have to stand out openly attacking women: his words would be labeled as misogynies. But no one accuses an elitist conservative feminist of misogyny. And that’s how we ended up with feminism being attacked from inside academia by some women of academia. If you think that the Supreme Court is the only one to be blamed for the loss of abortion rights, think again. Everything was being put in place to get there, including a public bashing of feminism as ‘baby killers’, and this is the ‘women’s philosophy’ that would back that up: “feminism is passée”; no obstacles anymore to patriarchy.
Of course, I don’t mean every woman there; the problem is that some who are not like that are afraid of taking a stand, fear of losing access, fear of losing status as elite intellectuals, fear of being attacked and bullied by the women who “love patriarchy”. Google the term yourself if you believe I’m out of my gourd. Never in a million years (I’m 70 years now) would it have crossed my mind that I would be witness to the aberration of ‘feminists’ writing papers about why patriarchy is good for women.
Is it possible that they fear that their academic work will be labeled and dismissed as ‘the work of a mad feminist like Firestone ’? Of course, it is possible because fear is a leading characteristic of earthlings. I have quotes in this blog that support this ‘theory’. They made a pact with the devil, but he won’t pay. There are many articles online about feminists in academia protesting discrimination. I’m not inventing this. Women in Academia: Why and where does the pipeline leak, and how can we fix it?
Sorry, I don’t think you can fix it. You lost abortion, and killed feminism. You have become powerless. Get used to it.
These are powerful fears rooted in reality, not on women’s delusions or conspiracy theories. (Europe is adding abortion rights to their constitutions in view of how we lost them here.) I’m not putting all the blame on you, conservative feminists of academia, but, unbeknownst to yourselves, you have being played like a ukulele. And you still don’t see it!
All I know is that Shulamith Firestone, this troubled powerhouse of intellect and fearlessness, gave us her profoundly thought-out perspective about the human condition, in both The Dialectics and in Airless Spaces, and yet, there is not one biographical book about this remarkable woman.
Maybe some of the intellectual women of academia don’t feel like having to do research and find out how many of them (past and present) participated and abetted patriarchy in its figuratively public pummeling of that radical feminist. Or maybe they feel they have to cover-up their cruelty towards her when she was ‘down’.
I don’t apologize for my views on some feminists of academia. You ‘killed’ feminism, and ridiculed us ‘old feminists’ and our life struggles. There’s your breadcrumb: attacking other women to get a seat in academia.
SUMMING UP
These four writers I mentioned left us the story of their journey through a carefully and intentionally created hell in human society, created by governments, politicians, warmongers, greedy S.O. Bs., and, sadly, by our collective and individual refusal to look at ourselves in the mirror and see our fears reflected back at us, and dealing with them. Fear of mental illness and its social consequences, fear of losing status and privileges, fear of disclosing in the process how we participated and still do in the cruelty perpetrated in the name of freedom and democracy—you name it. There’s nothing more difficult for a human being than to confront oneself. As someone famous whose name I can’t recall said:
“I give myself good advice, but I very seldom follow it.”
The stories of these four people, fictionalized or not, ought to be a mirror for us today, reflecting back at us the past, and with it the sad truth that there has been NO REVOLUTION in the heart of humanity. We learn from the past how to develop more effective technology for weapons of mass destruction. War for profit continues to be a good business for the killing corporations, thank you for not asking. Our leaders worldwide are spending trillions of dollars on wars: Ukraine, Israel, Russia, China, and the African continent. Everything that Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Levi, and Firestone went through is happening to hundreds of millions of people today.
This post is not about blaming (only a tiny bit) but about making the effort to exercise self-awareness about how our human nature (greedy, hateful, e.g.), if left unchecked, will never come out of the quagmire we have been living in since ancient man discovered that he could use the thumb to hold weapons and to order others to be killed.
What will it take for that revolution in the heart to take place?
And about these trampled-over four human beings: No matter how impermeable to the suffering of others you have been trained to be in academia, no matter your claim to whoever believes you with your diploma to back you up, you just can’t prove that these writers’ lives and work were in any way a blemish or a puncture on the moral fabric of humanity. All you achieve to prove is that you lack the human empathy necessary to shave off, scrape off the callousness of this mindless humanity.
[1] ancient global practice alive today, not just by the Turks
[2] Look up the history of New York psychiatric institutions if you don’t believe me; Willowbrook State School would be a good place to start. If you do a cursory search online on the topic, you see that, as of today, nothing has changed much. Also, I’m not saying that Firestone went through electroshock ‘therapy’.
[3] This world has been run by men since day one, according to every religion and history books, there is no way anyone could argue convincingly and correctly against my statement. They know it, but they don’t want to face criticism for how bad ‘administrators’ they are and have been. In this post I don’t walk over eggshells about that. It’s you, it has always been you!!! (Said with a smile.) I’m not talking about regular men, just men in power.
[4] kings and, for sure, men of religions – Islam, the Catholic Church, and extremists in Judaism – all sharing their hatred of each other, and their fear and hatred of women, undeniably of men of religions in particular.
[5] Everything I said here about Cervantes captivity and the Spanish government and church’s reactions is highly debated to this day. I base my opinions on my many readings on the topic.
[6] ‘Sisterhood’ went the way of old feminism: ‘post’, meaning dumped and dead.
Airless Spaces and mental illness 